Happy Birthday: Windows turns 25 today

Today, on November 20, 2010, Microsoft Windows turns 25 years old. On November, 20 1985, Microsoft released Windows 1.0, a 16-bit graphic user environment that was considered to be state-of-the-art at the time. In the two and a half decades that followed, Microsoft became one of the wealthiest companies in the world as Windows turned into the de facto operating system installed on over 90 percent of computers worldwide.

Windows 1.0 fit on just two double-sided floppy disks and needed 256K of RAM (512K if you wanted to run more than one program at a time). It wasn't until Windows 3.0 that the operating system really started to take off, but this is where it all began:

Here's a timeline for the releases of Microsoft Windows operating systems:

The software giant has managed to sell 240 million copies of the latest version of its client operating system, Windows 7. The company is just starting to push its new mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7, but the sales are nowhere near the same level.

Let us end by saying a "Happy Birthday!" to Microsoft. May the next 25 years of computing be just as exciting as the world goes mobile.